1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to communication systems having remotely readable digital documents, and more particularly to the performance of communication systems having remotely readable digital documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Because the Internet evolved from the ARPAnet, a research experiment that supported the exchange of data between government contractors and (often academic) researchers, an on-line culture developed that is alien to the corporate business world. Although the Internet was not designed to make commercialization easy, Internet publishing and e-commerce have rapidly evolved. In part it is the very ease that anyone can publish a document that is accessible by a large number of people that makes electronic publishing attractive. Setting up e-commerce provides low overhead while reaching a worldwide market 24 hours a day. The growth and popularity of the Internet is providing new opportunities for commercialization including but not limited to Web sites driven by electronic commerce, ad revenue, branding, database transactions, and intranet/extranet applications.
Transaction Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the communications standard between hosts on the Internet. TCP/IP defines the basic format of the digital data packets on the Internet allowing programs to exchange information with other hosts on the Internet.
Domain names direct where e-mail is sent, files are found, and computer resources are located. They are used when accessing information on the World Wide Web (Web) or connecting to other computers through Telnet. Internet users enter the domain name, which is automatically converted to the Internet Protocol address by the Domain Name System (DNS). The DNS is a service provided by TCP/IP that translates the symbolic name into an IP address by looking up the domain name in a database.
E-mail was one of the first services developed on the Internet. Today, e-mail is an important service on any computer network, not just the Internet. E-mail involves sending a message from one computer account to another computer account. E-mail is used to send textual information as well as files, including graphic files, executable file, word processing and other files. E-mail is becoming a popular way to conduct business over long distances. Using e-mail to contact a business associate can be faster than using a voice telephone, because the recipient can read it at a convenient time, and the sender can include as much information as needed to explain the situation.
In 1989, researchers at CERN wanted to provide a better method for widely dispersed groups of researchers to share information. The researchers needed a system that would enable them to quickly access all types of information with a common interface. By the end of 1990, researchers at CERN had a textual browser and a graphical browser developed.
A browser is an application that knows how to interpret and display hypertext documents that are located on the Web. Hypertext documents contain commands, references and links to other text and documents. This allows a reader to quickly access related text. In addition to text, many documents contain graphics, audio and animation.
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, object-oriented protocol which can be used for many tasks, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods (commands). A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred. HTTP is described in a working document of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), entitled “Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/1.1” dated Nov. 22, 1995, which is incorporated herein by reference.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an authoring software language used to create Web pages. HTML is basically ASCII text surrounded by HTML commands in angle brackets, which are then interpreted by a browser. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) is a text-based language for describing the content and structure of digital documents. SGML documents are viewed with transformers, which render SGML data the way Web browsers render HTML data. Extensible Markup Language, is a pared-down version of SGML, designed especially for Web documents. It enables designers to create their own customized tags to provide functionality not available with HTML.
A Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) is a pointer or link to a location. The URL contains a transmission protocol, such as HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a domain name of the target computer system, a page identifier and a bookmark.
Commercialization of the Internet has been made possible largely through the development of the wide spread use of web pages in which file containing text, graphics, sound and video media are combined and displayed to the user as an integrated document. The combination of these files often requires that accessing files that may be stored on multiple servers that are owned and operated by different companies and are located at geographically separate locations. To the end user accessing the web page, the files are combined to form an integrated media presentation.
However, bottlenecks and traffic jams on the Internet reduce overall system performance and have a direct negative impact on commercialization. Accordingly, there is a need to provide businesses with an accurate, objective measurement of Web site performance from the end user's point of view. Thus, the need exists for a way to provide web site developers with information relating to the way in which the files that make up the web page are transmitted to the end user.